Polite and soft-spoken, Francisco Gimenez doesn’t seem too dangerous when you first meet him. But as CEO of eSalon (www.eSalon.com), this Mexico City-born iconoclast, in partnership with Color Director Estelle Baumhauer, is charging full force towards the at-home hair color consumer that Clairol and L’Oreal basically own.

In the fall of 2010, eSalon set out to turn the quest for the perfect medium brown upside-down. Educated as an engineer, with an entrepreneurial background in management at PriceGrabber.com, Francisco seized an opportunity in the DIY marketplace that has struck gold: as of June 2014, eSalon said it’s sold approximately 1,000,000 customized hair color applications to customers in the U.S. and Canada, representing 100,000 clients and an annual revenue of $25 million. Gimenez reported revenue growth of nearly 300% between 2012 and 2013.

“Often, it takes an outsider to launch something like eSalon,” he shrugged, adding that eSalon holds two patents for the brand’s custom color formulation which offers more than 60,000 current color variations based upon online customer profiles which ideally include a selfie. The success of eSalon evidences the growing trend in software-based start-ups, where capital efficiency optimizes industries ready for “disruption.”

“There is no true generic medium brown,” said Gimenez. “The perfect hair color does not exist. You have to create it on the spot.” A team of about 50 employees take the eSalon experience from start to finish, beginning with an order placed online, ending with the product arriving via USPS for about $20–offered at $10 for first-time users, bringing the bespoke blend into the range of drugstore box color. What’s in the box? A custom-mixed bottle of color (or two, for long hair, or hair with specific color issues), gloves, stain-guard and stain-remover to keep skin dye-free, shampoo and conditioner, all sweetly themed to romance (for instance, the shampoo is “Tinted Love”, available in 20 color-supporting shades), complete with personalized label. An optional accessories kit, including clips for sectioning the hair, is available for an additional $10. The competitor in the home-delivered hair color space, Madison Reed, currently offers 27 pre-mixed colors (soon to be 32) for $30 apiece.

Located in a 12,000 square-foot facility on a sunny boulevard in Culver City west of Los Angeles proper, licensed cosmetologists answer customer calls and process orders. Baumhauer, who was trained in Paris by celebrity stylist Jean-Marc Maniatis, and was the first woman color trainer at Dessange International salons, notes that if a customer’s request seems ill-advised, such as an extreme color-change, the team will contact the customer with suggestions for wiser choices.

Adjacent to a mini-salon where Baumhauer applies color to VIPs, mix-masters stand at digital work-stations and input client orders which cue precisely measured portions from the monster tanks of professional-grade pigments stretching from one end of the plant to the other. Carried by a network of cappellini-girth industrial tubing, the colors race onto the mix-line and converge over bottles whizzing past on the conveyer belt. From there, pickers quickly assemble the components, matching the order with a personalized print-out of one of approximately 50 customized instruction templates; for instance, application-time varies, depending upon the current color and condition of the client’s hair.

A mini-warehouse here holds less than one week’s inventory, with twice-daily pickups carrying the custom-mixed blends out to customers who may opt for home-color between salon visits, or may have abandoned the salon altogether. Bulk inventory is housed off-site, deep in the cement heart of industrial LA.

Gimenez reported that eSalon has recently expanded to the UK, and will introduce two new products for summer, Color Kiss Temporary Root Touch Up, and Perfect Ending Leave In Conditioner. For fall, eSalon will launch Cute Couple Brow Enhancing Serum and Two of a Kind Brow Color.